The Meaning of
Mu s ic
Leo Samama
Table of Contents
1. By way of a foreword
9
Part A
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Looking over Franz Schubert’s shoulder
What is music?
Where does music come from?
Music as imitation
Music as language
17
27
32
37
43
Part B
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Bach: Prelude in C major
Music and communication
Music as notation
Music as a temporal art
Music and emotion
On depth and elevation
55
76
84
91
95
102
Part C
13. Beethoven: the Fifth
14. Classical music
15. Hearing, listening and remembering
16. On composing
113
125
131
135
Part D
17. Dvořák and the Bohemian overcoat
18. A memorable moment
19. The conductor
20. The performing artist
149
156
159
172
Part E
21. Lully: the King is dancing
22. As the ancients sang
23. The history of the history of music
24. By way of an epilogue: music now
185
194
204
222
Further Reading
Index of names
About the author
234
236
240
1.
By way of a foreword
This is by no means a textbook, and at most a book to be read
for pleasure. In it I have captured some of my experiences while
exploring the wonderful world of music. These began when I was
about six years old, and my parents gave me an old record player
with a few 78 rpm discs. As far as I can remember, these were
some Beethoven violin sonatas played by Yehudi and Hepzibah
Menuhin, a few of Max Reger’s sonatinas with the Dutch pianist
Cor de Groot, and Saffford Cape with the Belgian Pro Musica
Antiqua performing works by Guillaume de Machaut. Apparently my parents were of the opinion that this was a good fijirst
selection for a child of six, and indeed, perhaps they unwittingly
shaped part of my future. As a teenager I was allowed to sit next
to Hepzibah Menuhin to turn pages for her, and as a student I did
extensive research on Max Reger and his Dutch contacts for one
of my fijinal theses. To this day I am fascinated by developments in
the performance of early music, even though my own expertise
is based more around 1600 than 1350.
In the same year that I was given the record player and during
a hot summer, our opposite neighbour died. She was Alice Heksch, a well-known pianist and one of the fijirst Mozart specialists
on the fortepiano, though I knew nothing about that at the time.
As far as I was concerned, she was the mother of three somewhat
older children, who were often in our house that summer. Their
father was the violinist Nap de Klijn. The room in which Alice
Heksch lay ill was shielded from the hot summer sun by a yellow curtain that moved gently in the breeze. That summer my
parents also played me a long-playing record, Mozart raconté aux
enfants, on which Mozart’s life was narrated by Gérard Philipe,
a famous French actor who had died at a young age. This told of
Mozart’s journey to Paris, where his mother died in 1778, the sad
moment unfolding to the fijirst part of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in
A minor. How heartbreaking could you make things for a child?
That sonata, the death of Mozart’s mother and that of the mother
9
of the neighbouring children behind that yellow curtain have
remained inextricably linked in my mind ever since.
The music lessons I had in elementary school turned out to
be no less important in my journey through music. We had a
teacher who, with a great deal of understanding and attentiveness, introduced us to what music is and, more especially, how we
could participate. With her guidance, we performed a children’s
opera by the Dutch composer Tera de Marez Oyens: De koning
zoekt een liedje (The king searches for a song), and it was thanks to
this teacher that I took my fijirst active steps in music. As a result
of my recorder lessons with her I was swiftly paired up with her
son so that we could play duets together. He was the same age
as me, and we soon discovered a wealth of old and new pieces
for two recorders. Her name is Marijke Ferguson, and her son is
the renowned author Willem Jan Otten. Since those childhood
years, my interest in and love for music has always remained.
When I was about thirteen, my younger sister and I took the
train every week from Hilversum to Utrecht, where, in the former
Institute for Musicology on the Rijnkade, the newly established
local Jeunesse Musicale or ‘Youth and Music’ department had a
youth orchestra directed by the young Dutch composer Bernard
van Beurden. Here we played tiny ‘children’s symphonies’ that
were indeed tiny in every regard, but one day Van Beurden had
a surprise for us. He had set up a large blackboard in front of our
chairs, on which he had written a series of twelve diffferent tones
in musical notation. The intention was that we would improvise
with these twelve tones. One of us had to play the whole series,
the other only a part. We were free in our choice of tempo, and
in the duration of each individual note. Van Beurden led us step
by step through this intransigent material, so that after about an
hour we began to discover something in what we were doing: a
story, our story – and music: twelve-tone music. Ever since that
afternoon, contemporary music has been a source of endless
fascination for me, even when I haven’t always liked what I’ve
heard or played. The path towards writing my own music was
paved.
10
One day, in the sixth class of high school, I was asked by the
headmaster to take over the music lessons of the fijirst class.
The music teacher was ill, and it might be some time before he
returned. I had just been given a beautiful book by my parents,
The Joy of Music by Leonard Bernstein, and I had also recently
seen a few of his Young People’s Concerts on TV. In short, I knew
what to do. I can’t remember whether I succeeded, but the experience certainly gave me a taste for teaching, and not long after I
started giving Sunday afternoon readings in the Rosa Spier Huis,
an exclusive care home for elderly artists and intellectuals in
Laren, near Amsterdam. The pick of the Dutch intelligentsia sat
opposite me in the small hall, and they took the greatest of glee
in rapping me over the knuckles at every opportunity. This was
apparently no deterrent, however; on the contrary. As soon as I
was given the chance to teach I grabbed it with both hands, and
I can now look back on forty years of educational involvement
in numerous institutes.
Many of the subjects that have been important to me over the
years and the insights I have acquired through doing, reading and
learning – sometimes with only a week or two’s advantage over
my students in the beginning, but later with a little more ease
and perspicuity – have found their way into numerous articles
and lectures, and also, to a certain extent, into this book. This
is therefore above all a personal account, and not an attempt to
dish up absolute truths, should they even be said to exist at all.
There are few certainties in music. There is, of course, an everincreasing stockpile of information about the lives of composers
and their music. We have endless quantities of scores, and there
are many documents about composers and their work that have
survived from their own time – documents with reactions, evaluations, theoretical reflections and analyses – but truths? These
are rarely to be found.
There are no defijinitive answers, nor do we have a defijinitive
history. Kant was certainly often right in his in-depth reflections on music, but he also got it wrong. The same goes for Saint
Augustine, Schopenhauer and Adorno. Mozart and Beethoven
11
cannot be qualifijied in absolute terms as the greatest composers
who ever lived, and not even Bach can be described as such. They
are the greatest in our culture and in our times, and will be for
as long as we continue to relate to music in the way we have for
the last few centuries. This book does not provide the ultimate
answers to so many questions. It contains possible answers, and
in many cases no more than my personal answers.
We live in a labyrinthine world; a world in which monocultures barely exist. Mutual influences and fusions increasingly
characterise our existence and our ways of thinking. The majority of subjects in this book therefore provide space for a variety
of perspectives. In the case of music, the lack of unique or fijinal
interpretations is even greater than with the visual arts or in
literature. For this reason, I will make no attempt to tell balanced
and orderly stories. That would suggest that there is such a thing
as a single history of music, and only one view with regard to this
most intangible of subjects.
The only certainty that I would dare to advance is that music
plays an irreplaceable role for virtually the whole of humanity.
We can’t do without it. As an expression of what we do and think
as people, music, just like painting, literature and philosophy,
represents who we are. These things defijine us as people, and
give us an identity. As a wordless language, music is better placed
than other forms of expression as a means of communication
that can break down boundaries. More than any other form of
art, music can also touch us physically with the immediacy and
power of pure sound. At the same time, music is more abstract
than every other form of human expression, with the exception
of certain facets of mathematics and philosophy.
Despite all of the emotions that we undergo when listening,
music demands of its participants – composers, performing
musicians and listeners – that in the fijirst instance they engage
their brains, in order subsequently and on that basis to be able
to offfer space to their emotions. Music is transformed into such
a remarkable phenomenon through a combination of faculties:
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the mathematical qualities of an architect, the abstract thought
of the philosopher and the communicative gifts of an orator. At
its best, music is visionary, earthy and physical, exceptionally
complex and deeply contemplative, but it is also very direct. We
can listen to it mindlessly and have it hit us with an unforgettable
intensity, and in its aftermath become equally fascinated by the
logic with which the master builder has erected his structure in
sound. For many music is like a belief or a ritual, and for others
it offfers relaxation. It opens up far horizons and dream worlds,
can elevate us from the everyday and, through its directness, also
bring us back to the present with both feet fijirmly on the ground.
In recent decades, complaints have been made about the elitist character of what is popularly referred to as classical music,
or the higher art of music. Fortunately a substantial amount of
music is elitist, in the sense that we look up to it; it occupies an
exalted plane above us. It is expressly this exalted, transcendental side of music (indeed, of all great art and all higher thought,
both secular and religious) that points the way upwards for us,
consciously and unconsciously. Is it not the case that humanity
strives to follow an upward path? The more people who feel this
desire, and who seek out and act upon it, the fewer there will be
who perceive this objective as elitist. It is precisely the task of art
as a cultural product to reach as many people as possible and take
them along on this upward journey. There can be no concession
or compromise. Let the best music remain elitist and let us all,
composers, musicians, artistic directors and radio programmers,
expose as many people as possible to its exceptional qualities:
something to which I hope this book will also make its own
contribution.
13
2.
Looking over Franz Schubert’s
shoulder
There is a painting of Franz Schubert at work. He sits in his dressing gown, a quill in his right hand. His head rests against his left
hand, and there is a pair of slippers on his feet. A lamp shines
onto the tabletop, and the shadow cast onto the wall next to
him seems like an apparition. Schubert is composing, and there
begins the mystery. Composing: how is it done? Cesare Bacchi
painted his canvas a hundred years after the composer’s death.
1. Cesare Bacchi, Schubert at work (1929).
17
Then, and now, but also in Schubert’s own time, the composer’s
craft was surrounded by riddles: more so than that of the painter,
the sculptor, the writer or the choreographer.
Even though Schubert’s friends described his work routine
in plain language, the questions remained as to exactly how he
arrived at those notes, those melodies and harmonies. Did he
hear the whole orchestra or the singers singing in his head, or
could he feel the piano under his fijingers even though there was
no piano to be found in his room, at most a guitar? ‘Schubert
sat at his work desk at six o’clock every morning,’ wrote Anselm
Hüttenbrenner, ‘and composed until one o’clock in the afternoon.
During this period a number of pipes were smoked. In the afternoon he went to the cofffee house to drink, to smoke, and to read
the newspapers for a few hours.’
Schubert didn’t use an instrument to compose. Now and again
he would check something on a piano elsewhere, and sometimes
he might try a few chords on his guitar. He chose to work in
absolute silence, as the sound of an instrument would only disturb his thoughts. He would occasionally play his tabletop like
a dummy keyboard, just to feel a passage in his fijingers, but even
if there was noise from outside he would continue undisturbed.
The clattering sounds of the street, people talking or children
playing, even cold and damp conditions or bad light: nothing
could distract him or prevent him from working.
I can’t imagine a more perfect image for the lonely creative
artist: a man, a quill, a sheet of paper, a lamp, and that shadow
on the wall. This is where it all happened, though Schubert also
composed while walking around town or in the country, or even
while in the pub: always in his head, and therefore invisible to
outsiders. A good symbol had been found for this hundreds of
years earlier: the dove on Pope Gregory I’s shoulder, which gave
him inspiration for his ecclesiastical chants. This was what the
faithful sought, the Holy Spirit whispering divine melodies into
the ear of the Pope. Many people still have this image in mind
when it comes to inspiration and creativity: it has to come from
somewhere.
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There has never been a composer who focused alone on the act
of creating, not even Schubert. When a work is ready, it has to
be turned into sound: it must be performed, by the composer
himself or by others. Ultimately the piece only really exists at
that moment, when the musical work of art becomes a listening
experience, also for the composer. Very few people are able to
read a music score as they would a novel, and therefore have that
physical experience, or at least be able to imagine sounds from
the page alone. The actual experience can only happen in the
reality of the sound, and this is why the practice of music almost
always consists of an unbreakable triangle: composing, performing and listening. Each of these has its own rituals, functions,
history, position and points of view.
Every one of these three fundamental principles of musical
practice also leads to further division and reflection, and in the
end to the question as to how we, as creative, transformative
and receptive people, can experience music in such an intensive
and all-encompassing way, without truly understanding how or
why. The mystery remains, whether one composes, performs or
listens. Music is almost ubiquitous in people’s lives, and probably
has been for many tens of thousands of years. We experience the
power of music individually and collectively, in concert halls or
churches, at a pop concert or dance event, on the football fijield.
With this, we inevitably arrive at another aspect, namely the
function music has in society. After all, as soon as music begins
to sound, there are participants in this event. First of all the
composer, as the supplier, then the performing musicians and
the listeners, and sometimes also the composer as the performer
of his own notes. None of these is involved in the performance
in a disinterested way; not even the casual passer-by, the
unexpected guest or the person who doesn’t want to listen at
all. Once you hear music there is almost no way of avoiding it.
This has to do with what music is, beyond its mere sound. It is
what music represents, what listeners make of it individually
or collectively, and what music can do with or for us. Music is a
social phenomenon.
19
Let us return briefly to the painting of Franz Schubert at his
work desk, since the romantic image of the artist depicted here
is a deceptive one. For us, Schubert is still the prototype of the
‘free young man’ with a great talent. He lived for music. As he
said himself, ‘I was born to compose and for no other purpose.’
Schubert is seen as the bard of country life, of unrequited love,
of the desires of the common man, of the beautiful miller’s
daughter, of winter wanderings: in short, Schubert the dreamer.
But is this the truth? Did he really stand so far outside of society?
We do know a few things for sure. During his short life,
Schubert did in fact pursue the security of a permanent post.
To this end he had studied at one of the best schools in Vienna
and with one of the best teachers, Antonio Salieri. His father
didn’t see a life in music as suitable, however, as the chance of
earning a decent living was minimal. He had the career of a
schoolmaster in mind for his son, just like himself. The young
Schubert was determined to be a musician however, and applied
here and there for work, but to no avail. A position at the Opera,
to which he presented numerous (not entirely successful) operas,
or at the Court chapel: none of these were granted. So it was
with reluctance that he became a ’free young man’, and while
he enjoyed that freedom to the full for as long as his friends were
able to maintain him, this was never his aim.
Schubert was never a social outsider, as the image of the
‘wandering’ composer suggested. He was a social climber. His
father had come to Vienna from the Silesian part of Moravia, and
his mother was of Bohemian descent. Schubert’s parents settled
in the northern suburb of Lichtental in the Himmelpfortgrund
district. More than three thousand people, the majority of them
immigrants, lived there in some eighty new apartment buildings,
all of which lacked on-site sanitation. After several years working
as a teacher in Lichtental, Schubert’s father was fortunate enough
to be able to buy his own house and provide his youngest son
with a decent musical education. Schubert was well aware of
how far he would have to scale the social ladder, given his talent
and social background.
20
Around the age of twenty, Schubert joined the literary clubs
of kindred spirits in Vienna and Linz, introduced by friends
such as the poets Franz von Schober and Johann Mayrhofer.
These were places in which the most recent novels and poems
were read. The ideals of the mostly youthful membership were
freedom, fatherland and friendship, at a time in which freedom of
thought was a scarce commodity under the Metternich regime.
In the fijirst half of the nineteenth century, reading clubs were
not only in favour as an intellectual pastime, but also as a place
where people could meet relatively undisturbed under the guise
of art and culture (and a little entertainment), without such
meetings being classifijied as dangerous to the state and therefore
forbidden.
Among Schubert’s friends in these clubs were supporters of
the war of liberation in Greece and opponents of the reactionary
and restrictive government in Vienna. Together they read newspaper articles about politics, devoured the latest collections of
poetry, and discussed the meanings of these texts in the light
of their ideals. With this in mind, we can place many a poem
from this period (and even the previous decades) in a context
other than the exclusively poetic. There was enthusiastic praise
for the freedom of the wanderer in nature, of itinerant singers
or street musicians. For this alone, Heinrich Heine was one of
the most beloved poets amongst the youth of his time, wandering through nature to express his resistance to the autocratic
regime.
People were also still reading the poets of the previous aristocratic era, such as Christian Schubart, whose Die Forelle, through
Schubert’s music, remains a symbol for rural life and romantic
charm to the present day. Schubart’s poem can also be seen as
a warning, however: the freedom of the trout in the stream is
short-lived once the fijisherman has him on his hook. Neither
should we overlook the last lines of the poem, which were ignored
by Schubert, in which the trout suddenly becomes symbolic of
a young girl, and ‘Ruthe’ becomes not only a fijishhook, but also
a rod. Was Schubart talking about dissolute boys who wanted
21
to entrap girls, or might this even be the ‘jus primae noctis’ to
which Mozart also refers in Le nozze di Figaro?
We are dealing here with possible underlying meanings,
reading between the lines, and perhaps even listening behind
the notes. It is precisely this oft-hidden meaning in a work of art
that can expose its deeper layers and explain its creation from a
variety of viewpoints and extra dimensions. Did Schubert merely
write pleasant, folksong-like works in a rural setting, or did he
want to point to something that would have been understood by
his ‘target group’ at the time, but that now eludes us?
This applies not only to Schubert and his music: one could say
that our perception of the many signals in the works of Machaut,
Josquin des Prez, Monteverdi, Purcell, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi,
Bruckner or Tchaikovsky hardly exists today. We are often ignorant of the sources to which they allude. Equally, we do not
have the knowledge that would have allowed listeners of the
time to understand to what the composer was referring. We no
longer have the ears to distinguish the nuances that would then
have seemed obvious. We are, for instance, no longer shocked
by dissonance, even when it occurs in the ‘wrong’ place, such
as at the beginning of Beethoven’s First Symphony. Works of art
from the past have been removed from their original context,
and to us have become more abstract than the composer might
ever have imagined.
Are some of Schubert’s songs indeed simply the romantic
scenes that we like to recognise? Is the Moonlight Sonata by
Beethoven really a sonata about a loving couple under the light
of the moon, or rather an ode to death? After all, between his
sketches, Beethoven copied a fragment from the Commendatore’s
death scene in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni: the same triplets,
the same lingering pace… And do we have sufffijicient knowledge
and understanding of the melodies of the Church of Rome and
their many variants to be able to recognise the references to
numerous religious chants in the polyphony of Josquin, Lassus
or Palestrina, and thereby to give them their correct meaning?
22
Are the symphonies of Brahms or Bruckner as absolute and
autonomous as we think, or have we become deaf to the secret
(melodic or other) messages woven into them, precisely because
we want so much to understand the music of these composers
as absolute and autonomous? Do we have enough insight into
the complex web of textual associations and musical references
in the songs, chamber music and symphonies of Schubert to
understand them properly, without always associating them with
that romantic bard and his delightful, folksong-like melodies?
As I have already said, Schubert’s world was much wider than
that of the average whistling songsmith. He was well-read, curious, widely orientated, ambitious and especially well grounded.
Mozart and Beethoven were both idols of his, and at the same
time he had sufffijicient knowledge of harmony, counterpoint
and every important instrument to be able to write a song, a
work for piano, a string quartet, a symphony or an opera with
equal ease. In the later 19th and fijirst half of the 20th century, his
genius was predominantly recognised as that of a composer of
songs. Beethoven was his superior in every other genre. The same
was true of Schumann, for whom only the great works for piano
were above criticism. Neither Schubert nor Schumann sought
to compete with Beethoven, however. Of course they wanted to
learn from Beethoven, but not to compose as Beethoven, whose
aesthetic was not theirs. Where Beethoven thought in terms
of tragedy and of ancient drama, the world of Schubert and
Schumann was that of the novel, the fairy-tale, the narration of
fantasy. This was also the case in their music, and they were looking for other narrative solutions. Both had to shake themselves
free of Beethoven in order to become his equal.
Whilst Schumann and Brahms were able to work with some critical distance between themselves and Beethoven, for Schubert,
this great fijigure was a living fellow citizen of Vienna with a huge
reputation and a large number of supporters, amongst whom
were Schubert’s friends. Just imagine emerging from beneath that
kind of pressure, an efffort made all the more difffijicult because he
23
cherished infijinite respect for the man. When Schubert began to
compose seriously as a teenager in 1812, Beethoven was already
widely known in Vienna as a great master, and ten years later
he had acquired the status of a living legend. Until that time,
Schubert had almost exclusively made his name through his
many songs. He had also, it has to be said, created a unique place
for himself in this way, even though the best-known of these were
not at the time considered songs, but rather dramatic scenes.
While Schubert’s main talent, at the age of 25, seemed to
be writing songs for the drawing room and private circles,
his ambition, as we have already indicated lay rather in the
composing of operas, church music, symphonies and string
quartets. It was a challenge for him to reach a wider audience
alongside Beethoven, and to create his own market with a
recognisable personal style and technique, not as a clone of
Beethoven. However, for a number of reasons his effforts failed
to take offf around 1822. Schubert was already in difffijiculties with
his life-threatening illness, for which he had been hospitalised
several times. He had also failed to complete some of his most
ambitious compositional plans, the famous example of which
that immediately comes to mind being the Symphony in B minor,
generally known as the Unfijinished.
We have to ask ourselves whether the work was indeed unfijinished, or did Schubert feel it was in fact complete with its two
parts? Both theories can be defended, and there is also evidence
for both. The evidence suggesting that the symphony was incomplete includes not only the preserved sketches for a scherzo, but
also the unfijinished state of various other works written at the
same time as the symphony. Backing up the ‘complete’ theory,
there is a text by Schubert in which he writes about a dream
that addressed his complicated relationship with his father. In
its structure and emotional shape, this text is similar to the
two movements of the Unfijinished. Could this be presentable as
proof, or is it more a case of ‘wishful thinking’? Either way, this
symphony has established itself in our consciousness for 150
years as being in two parts. We know nothing other than that
24
it has two movements, and as a result we are unable to imagine
the possibility of a four-movement version.
As a work of art, the Symphony in B minor exists, as does every
composition, simply in the way it presents itself. The degree of
completeness of the two existing movements is so perfect that we
are simply unable to imagine an alternative version. With these
two movements, Schubert arrived in a world that was not only
entirely his own, but one that left its mark right up to the fijirst
decades of the 20th century, especially when viewed alongside
the Symphony in C major from 1825/26, which was completed in
a four-movement form. Without Schubert’s ‘endless’ melodies,
which are often so easy to sing and which he repeats in their
entirety, smoothly modulating through the keys with numerous
subtle diffferences, variations and harmonic nuances: without his
gift for great romantic stories about longing for love and nature
and about human shortcomings, much of the music of later great
masters such as Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, and even Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, would have been diffferent. Only one
other masterpiece had the same efffect on the music of the 19th
century, and that indeed came from the pen of his revered fellow
townsman, Beethoven: his Ninth Symphony. This influence was
felt not through the famous fijinale, however, but in those other
three movements. Here again, we hear how Beethoven was the
composer of tragedies, and Schubert of novels.
What Schubert achieved in the last fijive years of his life in two
symphonies (the Unfijinished in B minor and the Great in C major),
in several piano sonatas, in the piano trios, his last string quartets, the String Quintet in C major and in the song cycle Die schöne
Müllerin, is not only a uniquely personal musical language, but
also the confijirmation that he was capable of creating grand and
sometimes extremely complex constructions in sound that are
not inferior to those of Beethoven. From this point of view, he
was not a composer of songs who did his best to write instrumental music of quality, but rather a master architect of musical
structures that are unique expressions of bourgeois culture, and
25
which as a result of their song-like melodies and through their
psychological layering and harmonic drama, reveal emotions
with which 21st-century listeners can still identify.
Did Schubert put all this together consciously? This is a question that can never be answered. We cannot fathom the miracle
of musical creation, and are left merely with guesswork. Schubert
indeed had all of the gifts, the perfect technical mastery, an insight into the human psyche and also into his own, a great feeling
for drama and the right sensors to give expression to everything
which concerns us and makes us emotional in his music. When
we listen to his music, we are not listening to a single ‘thing’,
but to a diamond of many facets that reflects the impact of so
many dreams and insights. Also reflected is the impact of the
wide-ranging results of countless explorations into the composer
and his world, and, no less, our own explorations of ourselves and
our strivings, we who perform and listen to his works, we who
change every day but can see ourselves reflected in Schubert’s
music; music that is always more than just its sound.
26